How Two Groundbreaking Books Capture the Power of LGBTQ+ Place-Makers and Mold Breakers

Eater

2 days ago

Vnyl was a kitschy diner around the corner from my mom's office in Manhattan, its walls decorated with things like old records and Elvis figurines, its bathrooms adorned with collage portraits of pop stars. It was, for a time, my favorite restaurant. My mom and I would dip in when she was working late and I was too young to go unsupervised. We'd sing along to whatever '70s retro hits were playing over plates of fried calamari. It was fun, it was cool. And as I recently learned, it was gay.
Author Erik Piepenburg casually mentioned Vnyl's 'gay restaurant bathroom' in his new book, Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants , and my mind was blown. Perhaps it's unsurprising that, as a 10-year-old, I wasn't yet aware that dedicating your bathroom to Cher meant anything. But as someone who wouldn't figure out she was queer for many years to come, it made me wonder why I was so excited when my mom suggested Vnyl for dinner. Yes, I loved the calamari, but was there something else about the place I was picking up on without even knowing? And if so, why should that be important?
Over the last decade, the question of what makes food or a restaurant gay has permeated food media. Today, two writers central to that conversation have published books on the subject. Piepenburg, who regularly covers queer dining for the New York Times , has written people's history exploring the topic. Meanwhile, John Birdsall, whose seminal 2014 Lucky Peach essay 'America, Your Food Is So Gay' essentially kicked off the queer food conversation, is out with What Is Queer Food? How We Served a Revolution , which spotlights the queer sensibility of various restaurants, recipes and cookbooks, some of which hide in plain sight.
These books come at queer food from different angles: Piepenburg is squarely interested in where gay people eat and why, while Birdsall documents the stories of the queer people behind the food. But both books are deeply concerned with queer placemaking, how a restaurant like a Times Square Howard Johnson's, a home-cooked meal, or a cake recipe becomes queer, whether by intention or accident.
No one thing makes food queer. Sometimes it's the chef, sometimes the diners, and sometimes it's just an ephemeral vibe, a defiance toward convention that allows other outsiders to see themselves in what's being done. We spoke with Birdsall and Piebenburg about their work and why the discipline of pinning down the relationship between food and queer identity is worth studying.
Eater: Both of you have written about gay food and restaurants for a while now. When did each of you know there was enough here for a book?
Erik Piepenburg: It was a light bulb moment. In 2021, I wrote a piece for the New York Times about what I thought would be the death of gay restaurants. I came of age as a gay man in the '90s, when gay restaurants were a dime a dozen, at least in New York, in Chicago, and DC, the three cities that I lived in in my 20s. I actually walked through Chelsea [in early May], and there is nothing there that reminded me of the heyday in the '90s. But I was wrong, because as I did more reporting and talked to more people across the country — I had so much material about gay restaurants because people had never been asked. Once I explained what I was talking about, these memories would just come flooding [back] of where they went after the club, or where they went to drag brunch. And with so much material, I thought, Well, that's my first book .
John Birdsall: I can't not talk about my 2014 piece 'America, Your Food Is So Gay.' Writing is a second career for me, after working in restaurants. That Lucky Peach piece came along, and I didn't think anyone would read it. But it became a thing. A year after that piece came out, there was a Gay Food 101 panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival. We were sitting in this packed room in Brooklyn, and you could feel the hunger of the audience, like, What is gay food? , like they've been waiting for someone to write about this.
I've been blessed and doomed to try to work that out. I'm drawn to this historical frame, but this book was actually something that my editor at Norton, Melanie Tortoroli, asked for. Publishing is so speculative, and she really took a chance on it. So I'm immensely grateful that she did ask for it, and that she allowed me the space to evolve.
You both admit that the boundaries and definitions of queer food or queer restaurants can be kind of flimsy. How did you set your own criteria for what you'd include?
Birdsall: I was really interested in using food to talk about the history of queer consciousness formation, and the civil rights struggle of the 20th century. I use the metaphor with Cafe Nicholson, of having that be a space outside. Because queer people were used to coming together over food or drink or partying indoors, with the blinds closed out of necessity. But the idea that you could open the window was a very important moment for me. In the post-Stonewall era, trying to give a flavor of this sense of 'Yeah, we are really outside.' We are really able to define who we are for a world that, for so long, had told us who we were, erroneously.
Piepenburg: I mainly had two criteria. One was to revisit the restaurants I knew well when there was still what I would call the 'gay restaurant golden age.' Places like Lucky Chang here in New York, which is still open decades later, or Florent, which I went to as a club kid back in the day. Annie's in Washington, DC. I wanted to look back on my own life and say, 'What does it mean to me now to have gone to these places back in the day?' Also, I was less interested in, like, where are gay guys eating on Fire Island? I wanted to know where are queer people eating today in Wisconsin or my hometown of Cleveland? I wanted to know where people who don't have the kind of queer community that we have in New York are going.
It's so easy to just focus on the bigger cities and places where people migrate, but there are so many other places thriving. I remember Greggor Mattson's book about gay bars mentions that a lot of small towns don't have enough queer people to sustain a queer bar, so they naturally become places for both gay and straight people.
Birdsall: What I love about your book, Erik, is that it's really a people's history. It blends oral history through your interviews, but there's a very grassroots focus that I appreciate. Erik and I were both recently in Boston for part of the Big Queer Food Fest. It's funny from my perspective, to go from Gay Food 101 to this, where the [event's] founders are showing up on The Kelly Clarkson show to talk about it. It's a similar arc with food, in general — in the days of Julia Child and James Beard, it went from something that was very domestic and amateur to suddenly being about rock star chefs. And I love chefs, and I love queer chefs, in particular. But something like the Big Queer Food Fest leaves out that scrappy story, the people who make places queer out of necessity, which Erik writes about so well. That is really necessary history, and I'm glad that your book exists, Erik, because probably what's coming is going to be a lot more chef-centered. I don't want to denigrate what chefs are accomplishing, but I don't want smaller, quieter stories to be overlooked.
Piepenburg: 'A people's history.' John, I might steal that.
Erik, you make the point that being a queer chef is very different from creating queer food or a queer restaurant. You interview plenty of chefs who are like, ' W ell, I just happen to be queer, but I'm not trying to create a queer space.' Both of you really show how a sense of humor or something else can transform a recipe or a space into a queer thing. I'd love to hear what you both think of that transformation.
Piepenburg: I talked to less than a handful of chefs in the book. It was much more about who's eating there, why they're there, and what it means to them. So, John, I think you're right. Queer chefs are a big part of the conversation about queer food, but I was more interested in queer placemaking, how and why this diner in a middle-of-nowhere neighborhood becomes queer at 3 a.m.? And the reason is [proximity]. Why did this particular restaurant become popular with drag brunch in the '90s? Because it was in the gay neighborhood.
I'm a Gen Xer; I don't love 'queer,' but 'queering' is a great word to describe what happens to these restaurants: Queer people are like, This is our turf. This is our space. You can either go with us and have a great gay restaurant, or if you push back, you're probably not going to last very long . A gay restaurant is a restaurant with a lot of gay people eating there. That's it.
Birdsall: I have long been trying to flesh out queerness, and I really wanted to talk about Edna Lewis in the context of queer identity that isn't narrowly focused on desire. There's the seminal essay by queer theory writer Cathy J. Cohen, 'Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,' and really thinking about queerness in the way that bell hooks described, which was being in opposition to the world at all times. So I looked back at cookbooks, which I love reading as serious texts, to see if I could recognize that quality of existing in opposition to the world, even in the limited world of mid-20th-century cookbook publishing. Of course, there was Alice B. Toklas, but also Genevieve Callahan, who wrote The California Cookbook . And James Beard was the guru of that for me, trying to navigate this world of being acceptable in society, but also keeping your queer soul. These subversive expressions, either in cookbooks or in early restaurants were really key for me to understand this broader history of food and queer identity formation.
Both your books really sound gay. They read gay. You use gay slang, you talk about gay experiences without explaining them, and you talk about sex in very frank terms. How did it feel to write that way? Was it a conscious choice, or is that just what naturally pours out?
Piepenburg: I've been a journalist for 25 years, and my editor suggested that I put myself into this book. I was like, I don't know, no one wants to hear from me . But in person, I'm sort of an open book, anyone who knows me knows I'm going to talk about sex and cock rings. It did take some convincing, but in the end, you really do get a sense of who I am and why these restaurants mattered to me.
Birdsall: It was a balancing game for me to hopefully address an inside and an outside audience. I realized that my book is going to speak to someone who is interested in Edna Lewis or Alice B. Toklas in the context of food, so a real history buff who wants to read about these people, and may not be queer at all.
For instance, one section is about Herman Smith [author of Stina: The Story of a Cook ]. He was indicted for being gay, essentially, and fled Portland in 1912. Part of the charges against him were that he had sex with this young man and swallowed his load. I had 'Semen Thief' as the title of the section. My editor was like, 'I think this is too much.' I didn't want to bowdlerize or sanitize things, but I wanted to try to speak to different audiences and have everybody feel comfortable and engaged.
Piepenburg: At one point, I did use the word 'otter,' and my editor said, 'Can you just explain what an otter is? If my mom's reading this, she's not going to know what an otter is.' So I explained that. But also, I have a chapter called 'Bread and Butt.' I don't know how you can talk about queer people getting in a room together and not talk about the flirtation and sex, and maybe sometimes sex at the restaurant. For me, the restaurant experience has been and can be an extremely sexual, flirtatious one. I wanted to be honest about that.
Did anything you learned while researching surprise you?
Piepenburg: I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which gay restaurants have been around forever. There was this golden age, starting in the late '60s and going well through the '90s, but gay people have been finding each other in restaurants since the early part of the century. If there's one restaurant I would love to revisit, it's the Automat in '30s New York City. It's cool to put in a nickel and get a piece of pie. But also that sense of, you're looking at me across the room, I'm looking at you across the room, maybe you have a particular flower on, or you wear a certain hat. That under-the-straight-gaze radar that gay men had to hone back in the day, I would love to revisit that. It reminded me gay people have been finding each other in public long before Hamburger Mary's came around.
Birdsall: The surprising thing was perhaps how different some of my reactions were to popular works. For instance, in the 1970s and '80s, there's this crop of out, self-conscious, and really liberatory gay cookbooks. There's one by The Kitchen Fairy, and I talk about a little bit by Billy Gordon's You've Had Worse Things In Your Mouth . These were things you would buy from a bookstore in the Castro that also sold porn. And in recent years in queer circles, these have been seen as important landmark works, starting with The Gay Cookboo k by Lou Hogan. I was surprised I had a different take on them. I saw them as gag accessories that don't reflect what's essential about queer food. They weren't really about food, they were about projecting an attitude. I found myself rejecting these books, and finding more sustenance in books from mainstream authors like Richard Olney, that have this pervasive queer aesthetic. I thought that I would champion these self-conscious, overtly gay cookbooks, but I didn't really think that they were valuable or important in the history of food.
Are there potential inclusions you loved that didn't make it into your book?
Birdsall: I would have loved to delve more into trans communities. There's this great story of Sylvia Rivera, one of the pioneers of the Stonewall Rebellion and a trans sex worker in New York. Right after Stonewall, Sylvia and Marsha P. Johnson came together, and formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Most of the trans sex workers they knew were homeless, so they got money together and created housing, and they got this mafioso guy to let them rent an empty building that he had. Every night, Sylvia would cook a big dinner for everybody because these sex workers didn't have much money; they tended to live on candy bars and Coke. It was this joyous food moment after Stonewall, where everyone was coming together around spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken and rice.
Piepenburg: I would love to revisit the story of a waitress named Dirty Helen, which was what she was called at this Milwaukee diner called the Ski Glow Laundrette and Restaurant in the '70s. Gay people went there because they knew she would take care of them. Maybe the food wasn't that great, but who cares? Dirty Helen was there to be like the mother that maybe they didn't have. That's an important role I would like to explore in the future.
Why do you think that there is an appetite for this specific part of queer history and queer culture?
Birdsall: It's a cliche, but there are so many untold stories in restaurants and that back-of-house universe. Although Kitchen Confidential is perceived as having cracked open that world, it left a lot of other stories behind. Even in 2015 when I talked to higher-end queer chefs in San Francisco, they were afraid and felt like it was just way too complicated to really profess a queer identity. That has always hit me as a huge injustice, and I feel, if anything, the work that I've done as a writer has been trying to correct that injustice. [...]
Piebenburg: I was at a party recently with mostly Gen Z and Millennial gay men, and they were saying how great would it be to have a queer coffee shop here in New York. And I was like, well, yeah, we used to have a lot of those, that's what Big Cup used to be. You can be in a restaurant or cafe with gay elders or with teenagers, places that are open to everyone, which I think is a big distinction between a gay restaurant and gay bars. I know both of our books explore that and say, yeah, we've done this. Maybe we could do it again.
Birdsall: I think what's important about both of our books is to accept that nostalgia exists, but also to try to tell a deeper story, a truer story, about the complicated texture of all of that. I mean, you could say there were 40 bars in San Francisco, but it's because bars were segregated. Rich gays didn't want to go to the Castro, they wanted to stay in their own neighborhood. We're trying to tell more nuanced stories about what our ancestors went through. It may not be what a queer reader comes to our books for, but I hope that they come away with a more complicated appreciation of what the people before us created, what they lived with, and how to apply that to our current.
Speaking of our current moment, Erik mentioned before the lengths gay men had to go to to find one another in a place like the Automat, and you both recognize that who you are publicly allowed to be is very different now. But I feel like every single day, the government is introducing new anti-trans legislation, and things are becoming deeply socially conservative. How do you think this affects the future of queer dining?
Birdsall: I think we need those examples of earlier generations who lived in really perilous times, who had to live underground lives, but who dared to come above ground, even in short bursts. And I can't tell you how grateful I am for younger generations of queer people who are really challenging our notions of gender expression and what it is to be queer. There was some study where a third of Gen Z identifies as queer in some way; I'm immensely heartened by that. The queer and trans worlds are much, much more political now than they've been for a long time, and I think that's a wonderful development. Hopefully, our books can fuel that movement by allowing people to realize that they're part of that momentum. It feels like a real privilege for me.
Lastly, what's your favorite queer meal?
Piebenburg: John's heard this before, because I love talking about it, but it was the broccoli-and-cheddar omelet with a cup of sweet-and-sour cabbage soup that I ate probably three times a week for five years at the Melrose Diner in Chicago. I basically ate nothing else. I was working my first journalism job, the 4 p.m.–to–midnight shift at the NBC station downtown. I would take the bus and stop right at the Melrose. I would get off at 12:30 in the morning, order that omelet, which was the size of a catcher's mitt, with the golden brown hash browns, and the soup. I would just sit there, sometimes by myself, watching all the gay guys walk from the bars back and forth. I don't know if that's queer food, but it's me in a gay context, in a gay restaurant, in a gay neighborhood, at a very gay time for me.
Birdsall: I came to San Francisco in the early '80s and came out. My boyfriend's ex-roommate, David, lived in this really shitty apartment in the Haight. Nobody had any money. I remember he once invited us over for this meal that was all dishes by Richard Olney from Simple French Food . He bought this delightful wine. And it was this experience of sitting down in this shitty room but feeling like, This is who we are — [Tearing up] sorry, I'm getting emotional. It was a really difficult time, but I felt like we were royalty. This is our tradition. This [meal] is from a queer author with a queer voice, who, although I didn't know it at the time, took classic Escoffier dishes and queered them. This is how we deserve to eat. This is how we deserve to come together, this elegance that we've carved out of this harsh world.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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